John, John, why persecuteth thou me?

Mike Savage needs a hug. He's clearly gotten all tense and irrational, though I should resist suggesting that he could benefit from some Hot Savage Love. I wouldn't wish to presume upon Dan Savage's sense of decency and propriety. (Dan Savage is the Liberal answer to Michael Savage and is therefore completely unsafe for work outside of Portland, Seattle and San Fransisco.)

Media Matters - Savage: "You're telling me there's no possibility of a conspiracy by the Democrats" to cause Roberts' seizure?: "Savage asked, 'Am I to believe there's no connection between Charles Schumer on Friday saying he would never appoint, or never, excuse me, approve another Bush appointment to the court, to any court? And then the chief justice suffers a so-called seizure two days later? You're telling me there's no possibility of a conspiracy by the Democrats to have caused this seizure in some manner?' He added: 'Tell me it's not possible, and I'll tell you you're a liar.'"

I should point out that it's pretty clever rhetoric, too. Can I definitely state it's impossible? Nope. I'm a pretty good rhetorician myself, but even I can't prove a negative.

I cannot prove that 9/11 was not a conspiracy. Actually, it had to be a conspiracy, the open question is "by whom and to what end?" But likewise, absent much relevant evidence to rule it out, I cannot prove it was not a conspiracy that included Bush and Cheney.

See how this works?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It's just absence of evidence - and the only thing we can say for sure is "we don't know." And therefore, if we deny his claim as absurd, he actually can characterize it as dishonest. We can only honestly take bets on the likelihood of some possible causative factor. So I cannot HONESTLY rule out the possibility that John Roberts was fed something to trigger a seizure, any more, than, say, I can rule out that the seizure was caused by the stress of a troubled conscience or sheer, overwhelming cognitive dissonance.

I would have to say that stress of some type - either physical or mental - is more probable than, say, a liberal getting their hands on a drug or device that would trigger a seizure at a particular place and in a particularly convenient point in the news cycle.

I'd have to render it as being as likely an occurrence - I mean, in terms of predictability and certainty of causation - as Paul being struck down on the Road to Damascus.

Come to think of it, Paul, prior to his seizure, enjoyed a social role not entirely unlike that Roberts has played over the years. I suppose the only way to come to even a tentative speculation is to see what Roberts' rulings look like in the coming years.

But as for "Dr." Savage - Well, let's just say I smell the funk that comes from seeing the end of the gravy train in the near distance. Savage, like the rest of the remaining Right Wing noise machine, are a remaining fringe speaking to a an ever-diminishing fringe, with the general ratings of right-wing talk and tabloid formats plunging like stunned ducks.

If they manage to convince themselves of what they say enough to be convincing to their remaining audience, I presume it's either due to medication, or the lack of it. And in Savage's case, I think that, unlike Rush or O'Rielly, it's due to a clear absence of essential medication!

Yes, folks, marijuana (and to a lesser, but significant extent, Cuban seed and Dominican tobaccos) are appropriate herbal treatments for bilious humors, while alcohol is contraindicated.

So, as a caring gesture, why don't you send him a nice, big black cigar...

...and tell him to suck on it.

tag: Michael Savage, Dr. Savage, Savage Nation, Freudian References, Homophobia, Paranoid Fantasies, Right Wing Talk, Hate Speech, Hate Radio, Dan Savage, Penis Substitutes, Nielson Ratings, blogmockery, Ridicule

Bill-O Blitzed by HS Junior

Dear Bill O'Rielly: Do you KNOW how much your producer hates your loofa-waving guts?

The following painfully viral video demonstrates what happens when your staff doesn't care to send you out properly prepared, or do a decent background on the student. Oh, wait, maybe they mentioned he was on the debate team, and you didn't grasp the significance. Yeah, I bet that was the way it went down.

Of course, since you HAVE been "the driving force" behind this controversy, the Other Side sent their very best debater, prepared with - heh - evidence! Then he just had to wait for a lie he could document. And the "other side" was represented by someone who was apparently conservative - and whom I will bet is in the Drama club. He played the "good cop."

I give them a 1. You get a 4.

I mean, the kid didn't even have to break a sweat. All I can say, Bill, is you are lucky they didn't send a senior.

clipped from www.radaronline.com

Last week, O'Reilly imploded during an interview with Jesse Lange, a rising junior at Boulder High School in Colorado (video above). He was on the program to address O'Reilly's criticism of the Boulder High sex-education program. Lange tells Radar that he knew he was brought on for an opposing view, but his main concern before the show was how to address O'Reilly. "I wasn't sure whether or not I should call him Bill or Mr. O'Reilly," Lange tells Radar. "In the end, I decided to call him Bill, because if I called him Mr. O'Reilly, it would imply that I viewed him as some sort of expert or authority figure." Lange also says that in a brief pre-show interview, O'Reilly asked him not to quote the incendiary parts from The O'Reilly Factor For Kids. "Bill expressly asked me not to talk about it on the air," he says, but the book was the perfect counterpoint to O'Reilly's thinly constructed premise.

Oh, and the comments! My God, the comments! There are actually people who honestly think Bill won that exchange!

But I think the best summation comes from Bill's Arch Nemesis.



Ouch. That's gonna leave a welt.

O'Rielly "less nuanced" than Father Charles Couglin

Bill O'Rielly makes me snicker uncontrollably whenever he says he's "fair and balanced" or refers to his show as "The No-Spin Zone." Fact is, he's a hack and a mouthpiece, anyone who'd ever seen him on the trash-tv show, "Hard Copy" knows that his journalistic standards are short of that tolerated by the "National Enquirer."

But it's nice to have real data to expose the lazy, lying slug for what he is, using actual data based on his actual content.

When the data show you to be "less nuanced" than Father Charles Coughlin, you are not "fair and balanced," you are in fact fairly unbalanced. Perhaps even in a clinical sense!

Content analysis of O'Reilly's rhetoric finds spin to be a 'factor': "Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O'Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

• Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
• Glittering generalities -- the opposite of name calling;
• Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths;
• Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
• Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are 'of the people';
• Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
• Testimonials -- involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin."

tag: Hate Speech, Hate Radio, conservative radio, Authoritarianism, integrety. Bill O'Rielly, Fair and Balanced

Limbaugh Jumps the Shark

Alternet wonders why Limbaugh hasn't been fired yet - apparently not understanding what "syndicated" means. But I do wonder how long it will take for people to realize he's about as funny and relevant as "Who's the Boss" re-runs.

This is a head-shaker. Imus gets canned for calling some college women basketball players "nappy-headed hos" and yet Rush Limbaugh plays "Barack The Magic Negro" on his show and he is still on the air?

And the story links to a video that is one long "coon joke" which makes me wonder another thing entirely: How stupid do you have to be to consider this either funny or informative?

If the best ammunition you can come up with against the policies of flaming liberals like Barak Obama and Al Sharpton is that they are (gasp) black, you ain't much use. Because, well, I got eyes, son. And whether their skin color matters to me or not, it's damn insulting that you think I think that's the ONLY thing that matters.

When the sum total of Conservatism has been reduced, on air, to "be afraid of the scary brown people" and "Trust George Bush because he's a good Christian White Man," I start recalling the awkward fact that George Wallace was a DEMOCRAT.

To add to your discomfort, here's a few more examples of what Conservative talk has become:



To think that thirty years ago, there were Conservatives on air like Ira Blue - and now all there is to represent the Conservative worldview are intellectual failures like Limbaugh, Imus, Boortz, Morgan and Coulter.

Good thing I'm a Libertarian already, or I'd have to become one just to save myself from the shame.

tag: Rush Limbaugh, jumped the shark, conservative radio, conservative commentary, , libertarian, bigotry, xenophobia, ethics, free speech, Liberalism, Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, bullying, prejudice

Attention, Bill O'Rielly and Melanie Morgan

tag: Media matters, Hot Talk, hate speech, KSFO, Fox News, Melanie Morgan, Bill O'Rielly

The Wrath of the Conned

NewsBusters busted for Complicity

Graphictruth Scoop - Apparently it takes a thief...
Spocko lost his hosting because of accusations of copyright violations. In the course of creating this post, I discovered that every image within the NewsBusters article that I checked was hotlinked, uncredited and that several are probable copyright violations without fair-use exception.

NewsBusters takes exception to the audioclip blogswarm, saying that various clips sent by Spocko to advertisers were "taken out of context."

NewsBusters does have a point. Context DOES affect meaning. But I and many others have wondered aloud what context would make the following excerpt acceptable.

"Now you start with the Sear's [sic] Diehard [sic] the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile [sic] and then you blow his bleeping head off. " [sic]

I thought I'd go to NewsBusters and see what they thought made it wrong for spocko to send that "out of context" clip of Lee Rodgers. NewsBusters provided the entire context of a clip/quote Spoko sent to an advertisor, exactly as you see below. And just for effect, they inserted some photos to help improve their reader's ability to put the whole thing into the appropriate context.

That’s Vulcan Illogical

Unfortunately, Spocko’s conspicuously brief transcript and audio link conveniently ignored and eluded the context of this discussion. Here is a more complete transcript of this segment:

Rodgers: You couldn’t make this up. This time he was breaking into cars. His name is Kevin Holder, he’s 41 years old. He’s been arrested 236 times. His crime history, his rap sheet is 43 pages long going back to 1980.

Now wouldn’t you think at some point, in what’s supposed to be common sense, middle-America, somebody would ask, “Why is this guy running around loose?” What kind of idiot judges have repeatedly set up situations where this guy could be back out on the street? Actually, in a common sense world every judge who has ever sentenced this guy to any kind of circumstance that would allow him to get out of jail, every one of those judges ought to be in prison for life.

Officer Vic: Sure, this is Montana.

Rodgers: This is what passes for law enforcement in the criminal justice system in the United States of America these days and it’s just, well it’s just disgusting.

Morgan: Clearly we need a three strikes law at a national level.

Rodgers: Yeah, some SOB like this, lock him up, throw away the key.

Morgan: Yeah.

Rodgers: Better yet, put a bullet between his eyes and get it over because he’s never going to be worth a damn, never going to be anything but a criminal anyway.

Morgan: Well, that’s a bit of a harsh judgment, Lee.

Rodgers: No it isn’t, no it isn’t. No, it’s only common sense. What does the guy do? He’s demonstrated two hundred some odd times where he’s been caught. This doesn’t even count all the times he’s gotten away with crimes. So what the hell is the point of letting some creep like this live? What is the point? Now you start with the Sears DieHard, the battery cables connected to his testicles, and you entertain him with that for a while, and then you blow his bleeping head off. Thank you very much.

Morgan: That’s what I like about you. You’re so temperate.

It’s a bit different when you find out that Rodgers and Morgan were discussing a felon that had been arrested 236 times, and were thereby using the Sears DieHard image to mock the justice and penal systems for his continued presence on the streets. Wouldn’t you agree?

Context is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Oh yeah. Since he's a criminal, it's apparently shameful and remarkable been tortured and then summarily executed = along with the judges who should have "Done Something." And just to make a vivid point of what our justice system should be doing to such persons, a photo of an Iraqi prisoner being "Stressed" at Abu Grab-ass is casually inserted.

This context doesn't help the case; Indeed, it makes it seem even more depraved.

NewsBusters is saying that it's perfectly OK to torture and abuse people, as long as they are BAD people. And how do we KNOW they are "bad people?" Because someone in a position of social authority - that is to say, someone like Lee Rodgers - says so.

Note that we have no idea what the arrests are for, but we know for sure that there's no more than two felonies. I'm not saying we are talking about a good citizen, and I'm not arguing that our system of justice comes up with outcomes that are just, fair or even reasonably predictable from ANY viewpoint of How Things Ought To Work.

But we have the rule of law and a system of justice in order to prevent vigilante action, because the people that tend to be vigilantes tend also to be racist xenophobes who hang strangers and give their buddies free passes for equally bad behavior. Kinda like NewsBusters.

With this one post, "NewsBusters" shows it's true colors as an apologist for the indefensible, rather than the media watchdog it claims to be.

That is a shame, by the way; Media Matters seems mainly to focus on the sins of the Right and there is definitely a need for a balancing viewpoint. But NewsBusters isn't fulfilling that need; it simply dismisses all critique of the Right as "Liberal Media Bias," no matter how accurate that criticism may be. That's not a service, it's an insult to our intelligence, not to mention the law.

Footnotes:
Blogswarm
Hate Has No Place on the Airwaves (Media Matters)

SCOOP!

In preparing this post for publication, I found that NewsBusters was hotlinking images: the Iraqi torturee image is here
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/e/ea/250px-Iraqis_tortured_wp-f.jpg
and the picture of Lee Rodgers, so stern and all authoritarian was discourtesy of the NYTimes.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/01/14/business/15radio1.190.jpg
On the rest of the page - cartoon of David Brock, stolen from
http://www.instapunk.com/images/David_Brock.jpg
Air America logo:
http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/brands/0014/6292/brand.gif
Bart Simpson:
http://www.cs.miami.edu/~tptp/Seminars/Wos-AoAR/Dunce.GIF

Somehow, I don't think hotlinking without attribution or permission to be a sterling example of journalistic integrity. Actually, it's both a potential copyright violation (though fair comment usages apply, of course) AND theft of bandwidth.

Ironic, considering how that "contextual correction" was to the effect that a pattern of criminality made it OK to hook someone's testicles up to a Sears Die-Hard and having a bit of fun before blowing their heads off.

I wonder aloud at this point if NewsBusters is compliant with the letter and spirit of a .org registrant. As they seem to maintain their own servers, direct complaints are likely to be futile, unless they come upon litigious letterheads, but servers have been blackholed for such things before. Bandwidth theft on such a blatantly large scale is an Internet Spanking Offense.

NOTICE: Access to .ORG WHOIS information is provided to assist persons in determining the contents of a domain name registration record in the Public Interest Registry registry database. The data in this record is provided by Public Interest Registry for informational purposes only, and Public Interest Registry does not guarantee its accuracy. This service is intended only for query-based access. You agree that you will use this data only for lawful purposes and that, under no circumstances will you use this data to: (a) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission by e-mail, telephone, or facsimile of mass unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations to entities other than the data recipient's own existing customers; or (b) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that send queries or data to the systems of Registry Operator or any ICANN-Accredited Registrar, except as reasonably necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations. All rights reserved. Public Interest Registry reserves the right to modify these terms at any time. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy. Domain ID:D106563722-LROR Domain Name:NEWSBUSTERS.ORG Created On:08-Jun-2005 19:51:08 UTC Last Updated On:08-Aug-2005 03:51:01 UTC Expiration Date:08-Jun-2008 19:51:08 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:Network Solutions LLC (R63-LROR) Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED Registrant ID:28150426-NSI Registrant Name:Media Research Center Registrant Organization:Media Research Center Registrant Street1:325 S. Patrick Street Registrant Street2: Registrant Street3: Registrant City:Alexandria Registrant State/Province:VA Registrant Postal Code:22314 Registrant Country:US Registrant Phone:+1.70338339 Registrant Phone Ext.: Registrant FAX: Registrant FAX Ext.: Registrant Email:Mark@SPECIALSYSTEMS.NET Admin ID:28150426-NSI Admin Name:Media Research Center Admin Organization:Media Research Center Admin Street1:325 S. Patrick Street Admin Street2: Admin Street3: Admin City:Alexandria Admin State/Province:VA Admin Postal Code:22314 Admin Country:US Admin Phone:+1.70338339 Admin Phone Ext.: Admin FAX: Admin FAX Ext.: Admin Email:Mark@SPECIALSYSTEMS.NET Tech ID:28150426-NSI Tech Name:Media Research Center Tech Organization:Media Research Center Tech Street1:325 S. Patrick Street Tech Street2: Tech Street3: Tech City:Alexandria Tech State/Province:VA Tech Postal Code:22314 Tech Country:US Tech Phone:+1.70338339 Tech Phone Ext.: Tech FAX: Tech FAX Ext.: Tech Email:Mark@SPECIALSYSTEMS.NET Name Server:NS2.SPECIALSYSTEMS.NET Name Server:NS3.SPECIALSYSTEMS.NET Name Server:NS1.SPECIALSYSTEMS.NET Name Server:NS4.SPECIALSYSTEMS.NET Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server:

tag: Newsbusters, first amendment, KSFO, Lee Rodgers, Disney/ABC, viacom, Spocko, blogintegrety, blogswarm, hate talk, talk radio, fair use, Genital Torture, Stress Positions, Electrocution, authoritarianism

Um, Bill? It's not that we can't have a conversation with you..

You usefully point out that you can't carry on conversations with computer geeks. Indeed there has been speculation about whether the ability to focus so valuable for technology jobs correlates with Asperger's Syndrome, a light form of autism. Nice job, making fun of people who aren't the social butterfly that you are.

Who's she talking at? Why, none other than our amazingly idiotic Bill O'Rielly, who has said this - and in public, no less!

I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.

-Bill O'Reilly

I wonder if he's capable of realizing the true irony of a radio host and frequent TV personality talking about how hard it is to talk to "these computer geeks." Yeah. Geeks like Marconi, Edison and Bell.

Of course, I find it hard to talk to someone so stupid as to speak in such a way as to suggest that it would be better for us geeks to be "killing real people" instead of playing video games.

So, Bill, the reality is this; the geeks that make it possible for you to bloviate on the air likely can't be bothered to have a conversation with you, but aren't quite aspie enough to just tell you that.

Of course, if you do find this posted somewhere at Fox, don't bother checking the printout for fingerprints. There won't be any. And the video surveillance will clearly show it was Albert Einstein who tacked up the note.